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New Itanium alliance

Intel and HP lead the new Itanium Solutions Alliance, aiming to expand Itanium …

Earlier today I did some edits on the "64-bit computing" chapter of my forthcoming book, and was reminded with some shock that Intel and HP started work on IA-64 in 1994. The first Itanium processor didn't ship until May of 2001, despite the fact that Intel had been actively promoting Itanium as The Next Big Thing for a few years prior. That's a lot of deadline slippage, and it's easy to forget the magnitude of it if you don't look at the actual dates.

Despite the revisionist history that some pro-IPF pundits like to propagate, Intel did originally envision IA-64 as a replacement for x86. By the time Itanium hit the market in 2001, however, it was clear that this wasn't going to happen in the forseeable future. But in spite of its delays and obstacles, Itanium has seen a steady increase in adoption in the high-end computing market since its launch.

Intel has tried with varying degrees of success to jump-start a software ecosystem around IA-64 that would expand the architecture's reach. The latest effort, which ZDNET has the scoop on, involves a roster of hardware and software and hardware makers teaming up to promote the platform:

The group, called the Itanium Solutions Alliance, has several plans to make Itanium more useful, said a source involved with the outfit. The alliance will sponsor porting events to help programmers bring their software to the processor, set up porting centers where such work can take place and create catalogs so customers in specific industries can find combinations of Itanium hardware and software for various tasks.

In addition to Intel and Hewlett-Packard--the co-developer of Itanium and the top seller of Itanium servers--the alliance includes server makers NEC, SGI, Unisys, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Bull, and software makers Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, SAP and SAS, the source said.

I think there are a few factors that are going to help the new alliance where past efforts have failed. First, Intel's dual-core Montecito is a pretty significant upgrade to Madison and will kick IA-64's already strong performance numbers up to the next level. Montecito also includes a number of power-saving features that will make it cheaper to deploy. So Montecito represents a significant improvement in bang per buck over its predecessors, which will make it easier for the alliance to sell.

The other factor that will help IPF uptake is Intel's plan to unify IA-64 and Xeon chipsets. This will make IPF hardware cheaper, since economies of scale will bring down the cost of the supporting logic.

So in contrast to the analysts quoted in the article, I think that now is a good time for Intel to launch an initiative like this. IPF adoption, while below what Intel might hope, is on the rise, and the hardware is poised to get cheaper to purchase and to run, while simultaneously getting more powerful. This doesn't mean that I think that IA-64 on the business desktop is ever going to happen, but it probably will continue to expand in its own (very lucrative) high-end niche... at least, until x86-64 creeps up into the high end and displaces it entirely. But before that distant day when Itanium dies of x86-related natural causes, Intel and HP will want to sell as much as possible of the hardware that they've been developing since 1994.